It is a pity that #Peertube has never been well integrated with #Microblogging.

Kadsepfösch

@thisismissem @smallcircles @peertube
I don't think this can only be handled on the link target side.

Mastodon already CAN resolve this issue, you just have to do it manually everytime:
1) goto linked remote post, copy URL
2) paste URL in Masto's search field
3) Tada, it shows the post inside Masto's UI where you can like and so on

Question:
Why doesn't Masto, when it linkyfies URLs in a post, also do the step's above and decorates a fediverse link with a button to open it "internally"?

Emelia 👸🏻

@Glatorius @smallcircles @peertube yeah, but that's a heck of a lot more manual work than the interaction modal flow.

Kadsepfösch

@thisismissem This is a honest question. I ask you because I know you are involved in the development and might have a bit deeper understanding.

It's just baffling for me how Masto handles (or better not handles) links to posts of even other Masto instances.

Emelia 👸🏻

@Glatorius I think it comes down to generally no easy way to tell that the thing _is_ an object. That's where the html discovery taskforce is working on like link headers and stuff so from html metadata you can discover the AP actor or object.

Kadsepfösch

@thisismissem This I don't really understand.

If I search an URL within Masto, it also only has that URL and can pretty quickly and reliably tell if it's an object (or an object for me since it also takes into account blocking).

But good to hear there's some research and work done to improve it. Thanks!

[email protected]

@smallcircles @peertube I've long complained that one of the biggest problems with the Fediverse is that it's needlessly fragmented into separate services, apparently just because commercial social media is similarly fragmented. Just because Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are separate services doesn't mean we need separate Federated Twitter, Federated Instagram, and Federated YouTube that can technically talk to each other but don't make it easy.

Emelia 👸🏻

@Glatorius right, but we don't necessarily know that URL attached to a post as a Link object is actually another object, instead we need to fetch the html and look for meta & link tags (and link headers) to discover "is this html an object"

Where as in search we assume you're looking for an object and not just sharing a link to any random web resource

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@cholling @peertube

Yes, ideally we'd had a more service-oriented fedi rather than one of app siloes with hub and spoke brittle integration pipes between them.

Kadsepfösch

@thisismissem Ah, got it.
So it is much processing work currently but it's okay for the search because there the URLs are mostly to objects. Not really doable for all links though.

...but wait. Doesn't Masto fetch the linked HTML anyways for the link preview? Oo

Oblomov

@jonny @thisismissem @smallcircles @peertube

Part of the issue is that the data model and frontend are too tightly coupled. “Microblogging” or “video publishing” or “photo publishing” should be entirely a front-end issue. The data itself *could* in principle be shared between all of them.

The other pain point (“wrong instance”) comes from the Fediverse, and could be solved with OpenWebAuth, which is one of the FEPs proposed as part of the nomadic identity support
https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/

Emelia 👸🏻

@Glatorius yeah, for search we can assume you're looking for AP things, so like doing a webfinger request or fetching as the AS2 content-type isn't so bad; but obviously we can't do that with any arbitrary link

We do fetch the full HTML, but the issue was a lack of standard link/meta tags to say "yo, this is an AP object!", that's what the taskforce is defining

Emelia 👸🏻

@oblomov @jonny @smallcircles @peertube yeah, there's a few things that make this better. I've a laundry list of OAuth changes I need to make in Mastodon before we can really consider those things though.

e.g., OAuth Client ID Metadata Documents to support IndieAuth and FedCM

jonny (good kind)

@thisismissem hell ya

TheFederatedPipe

I've thought about this. All fediverse backends should implement all kinds of objects. I think mbin is a lot better than others because of this.

#Activitypub

Kadsepfösch

@smallcircles @peertube Since this answer was boosted, here is an explanation of the current state and why this doesn't really work with every link for now:
https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/113486614405418531

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@jonny @thisismissem

OT: I might take this opportunity to point to something tangential in case you find that interesting, namely that @helge has prepared a forum topic for thinking about next-gen social web protocol visions, etc.

Wiki: Vision for a Fedi Specification

This topic is for people who believe, that we need a better specification underlying the Fediverse. In order to develop such a thing, one needs a group of people that work towards a common goal. The goal of this wiki is…

Discuss Social Coding (discuss.coding.social)

Julian Fietkau

@Glatorius @smallcircles @peertube It's possible, yes. I have definitely read a discussion about this somewhere on the Mastodon GitHub. From memory, you'd either have to do that check when someone first clicks on a link, which works-ish but would add potentially multiple seconds of delay in corner cases, or you check for every link in any incoming post, which would hugely increase the Mastodon DDoS effect.

James Smith 💾

@TheFederatedPipe @smallcircles Agreed, for full fediverse compliance, *something* should be shown for all types of object, and all actor types too!

Ignoring them completely is not helpful, it would be much better even to just display canonical link if nothing else is available.

I say this as dev of @manyfold; I'd like to be able to provide custom types that have meaningful semantics, but instead I need to use the restricted set of types that Mastodon will react to.

James Smith 💾

@TheFederatedPipe @smallcircles years ago we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OEmbed. Feels like we ought to be able to leverage something like that.

TheFederatedPipe

Exactly, the server shouldn't ignore it, the user via the client should do it if they wanted to.

I don't like the fact that @Mastodon has basically stalled the development of the fediverse, people here are way to afraid of breaking stuff. Don't get me wrong, backward compatibility is cool, but sometimes you gotta do it for the benefit of the whole net.

I've read about some cool FEPs that are basically ignored out of the fear of incompatibility with Mastodon or older versions despite de fact they solve a huge problem.